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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes "SweClockers.com has gotten it hands on a Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard running Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the long awaited successor of age-old BIOS. Among the differences is a significantly more user-friendly interface, the ability to boot from drives larger than 2 TB and faster boot times. Check it out, on video, in Swedish." Here's an Google's translation of the article.

Of course, you don't get to play with it, but then why would you need to?

The only boards that are worth having are the ones that validate my opinion of myself as an ubergeek. My entire self worth springs from my ability to adjust pointless hardware parameters through a poorly designed interface cobbled together by Korean sweatshop developers.

I will never buy a motherboard that doesn't allow me to set the Clock Phase Skew to 0.25, or and the Memory Overdrive Voltage to 1.79. Those are the correct values. If your Apple motherboard doesn't have a byzantine boot menu that allows you to set them, then you're being kept in a walled garden. If you allow Steve Jobs to be an authoritarian control freak who prevents you from setting your memory timing to 4-3-3-2, then why don't you just an iPad and a Wii, and the rest of us will use the real computers.

Now if you excuse me, I need to change the fuel injectors in my car. It's getting near winter, and as the air density increases I need to change the fuel air mixture. It's important that you stay on top of this. Only sheep leave it the same year round.

That's correct -- Microsoft optimizes their video driver by pre-rendering every possible graphic in advance, and including all of them as resources in the driver binary. That way they can display anything via a single lookup into the displays-table.